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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (125599)	3/4/2004 11:57:58 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The more I look at the issue, the less hopeful I become. The Russians are doing yeoman's work but the amount and scope of the work that needs to be done is daunting. The sources of radioactive material usable for a dirty bomb are everywhere. Take a look at this little-known incident in Mexico involving Cobalt-60 from a radiation therapy machine that got into rebar. Since Cobalt-60 has been in use as part of cancer therapy for decades, there must be hundreds if not thousands of the machines aging gracefully in the Third World, waiting to be dumped somewhere. Cobalt 60 is dangerous stuff, and perfect for a dirty bomb. Samalayuca's Silent Steel Nearly 13 years ago, a cancer-therapy machine was removed from the Medical Center for Specialities in Ciudad Ju rez and taken to a Ju rez junkyard that later sold the machine along with other scrap metal to two steel foundries for recycling. The machine contained 6,000 tiny pellets of radioactive Cobalt-60, which contaminated thousands of steel rebars (used to reinforce concrete) and furniture parts. The contaminated steel rebars soon found their way to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where they triggered a radiation detector. An international effort to track down and retrieve all the deadly steel commenced. Radioactive rods and metal furniture were eventually recalled from 23 states and three other countries as well as from across Mexico. Mexican officials calculated that close exposure to the leaking cobalt-60 would be equivalent to absorbing 35,000 chest X-rays. Already one junkyard worker has died from a rare bone cancer, and others have suffered from sterility and skin discoloration. The recovered radioactive material was entombed in concrete in Samalayuca, 35 kilometers south of downtown Ju rez. Recently, however, some 150 tons of the material was trucked from an open field in a section of Ciudad Chihuahua called Nombre de Dios, dumped at the site, and left uncovered. The discovery of this fact has sparked protests within Ju rez, concern among the residents of Samalayuca, and offers of assistance from U.S. environmentalists. The protests, led by the Alianza Internacional del Bravo (AIB) of Ju rez and the Comit‚ de Solidaridad y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (COSYDDHAC) of Cd. Chihuahua, have halted the ongoing transfer of contaminated material to Samalayuca. The two groups plan to investigate the level of contamination of the Nombre de Dios site and the Samalayuca dump, using a geiger counter loaned via the Texas Center for Policy Studies. Cobalt 60 has an exceptionally intense gamma-ray activity, and environmentalists fear that it may leach into groundwater or be carried with dust to nearby agricultural and residential areas, according to F‚lix P‚rez of the AIB. According to the Mexican nuclear safety commission, the cobalt is one-fourth as radioactive as it was a decade ago. The commission has not tried to argue, however, that above-ground, unlined storage is a safe disposal method. Félix Pérez, AIB: (16) 17-26-55 Pety Guerrero, COSYDDHAC: (14) 15-04-86 americaspolicy.org